Your comment is indicative of the crisis of legitimacy that has infected our governments, and most of the institutions of stability in our global society. It seems like a small thing; but once the perception that the forces of law and order are themselves lawless exceeds a certain critical threshold things begin to change rapidly. Indeed the United States itself came to be in the wake of the erosion of the legitimacy of Englands colonial government.
There won't be an announcement; but once that threshold is crossed events begin to move rapidly and forcefully and do not stop until a new arrangement of powers is found that society can scaffold itself upon. Who knows what will be the stable state of a world seeded with the idea of networks and knowledgable in their subversion and subornation.
I'd love to see some historical basis for this supposition that there is a natural counter balance to "lawless" power. First of all, your premise presupposes that there is some standard of "lawfulness" against which the existing power structure can be judged. If the powers that be are faithful to their own interests and rules then by definition they are lawful, since they create and administer the law. Your appeal to a higher morality (I assume, since I don't know what other standard there could be) makes a good muse for an artisan, but I see no evidence in the long, bloody history of our species that it acts as some sort of automatic restorer of natural order. Quite the contrary, in fact. It is the current state of affairs in some Western countries, in which the citizens have leave to consider whether their governments are lawful and ways to act if they are not, that is the exception.
I fear that we are talking past each other and have different readings of the same words; and vastly different conceptual backgrounds.
Map political science onto the sandpile model [1] to get a first order approximation of the framework of analysis I'm using from a macro perspective. On the micro level of individual perception; what matters isn't merely the perceived lawlessness of the elites and of the guardian castes, but the growing sense that "If you play by the rules; you're a sucker." And depending on your level of investment in the current order that sense can be a powerful motivator to working around limits that were introduced to promote institutional stability.
And if most peoples reality is that the ruleset they're working off of is largely economically workable only because it's technically illegal... that's inherently unstable.
Any institution can fail at any time, given the right trigger. The difference between a stable institution and an unstable one is the range of triggers that will destabilize it. When the legitimacy of an institution is threatened, this can only broaden that range.
So you're right to point out that there is no "threshold" as stated by the OP, however the frenzy with which the US government is undermining its own legitimacy as well as that of many other Western governments, does not bode well for our civilization (Western or otherwise).
olefoo mised two issues two issues - lawlessness and illegitimacy. Legitimacy in political science just refers to the public acceptance of authority (and the perception that everyone else accepts it too). In the US, that legitimacy happens to be tied to the belief that the authorities are bound by rules. Loss of legitimacy is a very serious issue for any political/legal system, but of course sometimes it doesn't lead to the collapse of the system, but rather a search for a new means to legitimate the old system - for example, the PRC's adoption of economic success as the basis of legitimacy rather than Communist ideology.
If there was a warrant, we should be able to get that information, and act on it, and figure out how to avoid it in the future.
Which comes to an interesting situation: if this was acted upon by NSL, here there's proof something happened, so how does that get explained without breaking the gag order?
